Ask Dave: What Is Electricity?
by Dave Barry
Today's scientific question is: What in the world is
electricity? And where does it go after it leaves the toaster?
Here is a simple experiment that will teach you an important
electrical lesson: On a cool, dry day, scuff your feet along a
carpet, then reach your hand into a friend's mouth and touch one
of his dental fillings. Did you notice how your friend twitched
violently and cried out in pain? This teaches us that
electricity can be a very powerful force, but we must never use
it to hurt others unless we need to learn an important electrical
lesson.
It also teaches us how an electrical circuit works. When
you scuffed your feet, you picked up batches of "electrons",
which are very small objects that carpet manufacturers weave into
carpets so they will attract dirt. The electrons travel through
your bloodstream and collect in your finger, where they form a
spark that leaps to your friend's filling, then travels down to
his feet and back into the carpet, thus completing the circuit.
Amazing Electronic Fact: If you scuffed your feet long
enough without touching anything, you would build up so many
electrons that your finger would explode! But this is nothing to
worry about unless you have carpeting.
Although we modern persons tend to take our electric lights,
radios, mixers, etc. for granted, hundreds of years ago people
did not have any of these things, which is just as well because
there was no place to plug them in. Then along came the first
Electrical Pioneer, Benjamin Franklin, who flew a kite in a
lightning storm and received a serious electrical shock. This
proved that lightning was powered by the same force as carpets,
but it also damaged Franklin's brain so severely that he started
speaking only in incomprehensible maxims, such as "A penny saved
is a penny earned". Eventually he had to be given a job running
the post office.
After Franklin came a herd of Electrical Pioneers whose
names have become part of our electrical terminology: Myron
Volt, Mary Louise Amp, James Watt, Bob Transformer, etc. These
pioneers conducted many important electrical experiments -- Among
them, Galvani discovered (this is the truth) that when he
attached two different kinds of metal to the leg of a frog, an
electrical current developed and the frog's leg kicked, even
though it was no longer attached to the frog, which was dead
anyway. Galvani's discovery led to enormous advances in the
field of amphibian medicine. Today, skilled veterinary surgeons
can take a frog that has been seriously injured or killed,
implant pieces of metal in its muscles, and watch it hop back
into the pond just like a normal frog, except for the fact that
it sinks like a stone.
But the greatest Electrical Pioneer of them all was Thomas
Edison, who was a brilliant inventor despite the fact that he had
little formal education and lived in New Jersey. Edison's first
major invention in 1877 was the phonograph, which could soon be
found in thousands of American homes, where it basically sat
until 1923, when the record was invented. But Edison's greatest
achievement came in 1879 when he invented the electric company.
Edison's design was a brilliant adaptation of the simple
electrical circuit: The electric company sends electricity
through a wire to a customer, then immediately gets the
electricity back through another wire, then (this is the
brilliant part) sends it right back to the customer again.
This means that an electric company can sell the customer
the same batch of electricity thousands of times a day and never
get caught, since very few customers take the time to examine
their electricity closely. In fact the last year any new
electricity was generated in the United States was 1937; the
electric companies have been merely re-selling it ever since,
which is why they have so much free time to apply for rate
increases.
Today, thanks to men like Edison and Franklin, and frogs
like Galvani's, we receive almost unlimited benefits from
electricity. For example, in the past decade scientists
developed the laser, an electronic appliance so powerful that it
can vaporize a bulldozer 2,000 yards away, yet so precise that
doctors can use it to perform delicate operations to the human
eyeball, provided they remember to change the power setting from
"Vaporize Bulldozer" to "Delicate".